simpler to the point that you need whole libraries and helpers (such as https://www.freeformatter.com/cron-expression-generator-quar...) to convert from readable time to cron specifications ?
Meanwhile, sd is just
[Timer]
OnCalendar=weeklyBut you loose the main point, that is consistency of syntax. Nowadays thanks to systemd I can use the exact same syntax to configure my daemons, my network, my DNS resolver, my timers, my locale, etc etc. The mental burden is way lighter than with the traditional UNIX toolset.
You could have made the same consistency and mental burden argument about the crontab syntax. There are a lot of things in Unix which are table-driven and the tables take the form of one line per record with fields delimited by whitespace, blank lines ignored, and line comments introduced by hash.
Indeed these are your job scheduler (crontab), your mount points (fstab), your local host name resolution (hosts), your NS switch (nsswitch.conf), your terminal login services (ttys), your device permissions (fbtab), your automounts (auto_master), your plug-and-play device permissions (devfs.conf), your network services (inetd.conf), your MAC policy (mac.conf), your local network name resolution (networks), your call-out telephone numbers (phones), your network protocol name map (protocols), your RPC service map (rpc), and your network port name map (services).
And those are just the ones in /etc .
This set of table files with a common syntax is just as consistent and as light a burden as the set of .INI files that you are talking about. And any argument that you can make about things like having to remember what the fields mean can also be made just as much about the .INI files.
You only "need" to read the man page - the same as with systemd (asuming it still uses man, and not its own custom help viewer). If you'd read said man page, you'd know you can just type @weekly, for such a simple time period.
It never became it, either. It was fairly quickly forked. Several times. Debian cron was forked from PD cron in 1994 by Ian Jackson, for example. The "standard one that everyone used to use" but only in the limited field of Debian Linux (and no longer, nowadays with Debian Linux version 9) was that fork, which M. Jackson actually named "Debian/GNU Linux's". RedHat made a comparatively much more recent fork. OpenBSD and FreeBSD have their own (different from each other) forks of long standing, too.
Mike Meyer apparently made a GNU cron for the Free Software Foundation in 1987. If it indeed ever existed in the first place, it has since disappeared without a trace.
I provide pre-made service bundles for the nosh toolset for various crons, and I have so far had to make separate ones for Dillon crond, Debian cron, Vixie (a.k.a. ISC or PD) cron, Guenter bcron-{spool,start,update}, Godouet fcron, and OpenBSD cron; because they are significantly different from one another.
In part, this is because although the crontab utility is actually standardized, in the SUS, cron (like many such non-ordinary-user-facing internals) is not standardized. This is actually a good thing, inasmuch as the radically different multiple untrusting dæmons architecture of Guenter bcron would not have been possible if it had had to conform to a standard of one monolithic cron dæmon.
What's that mean though? It's entirely meaningless unless you, what's that, check the manual. Or what if you want it to run on another day? What's that? Check the manual? Sound familiar?
In particular: which day of the week, and at what time?
cron expressions have about as much learning curve as ISO-8601, and are otherwise unambiguous once you know how to read them. systemd's time specifications look like they're full of special cases:
https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/systemd.tim...
Why is that simple? Monday isn't even the first day of the week!
But ISO 8601 is the standard so it makes sense to use that.
They also have other desirable behavior like being able to configure it concurrent runs are allowed or if the script should run if the initial date was missed or even restart the job if it fails up to a limit.
It's much more versatile than simply cron, due to that, it's also a lot more useful.
https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?crontab(5) is 1400 or so.
I'd hardly call that impenetrable. Additionally you will note that free bad has an extension to the format for shortcuts like monthly, weekly, &c.
I should note that `man crontab | wc` returns 1680 words while `man systemd.timer | wc` returns 1300 words. Take that for what you while, especially since .timer spends most words on explaining the options instead of the syntax.
I just don't want cron doing randomized delay and repeats. That should functionally be determined by the application.
I think it's perfectly fine that timer does this, it's useful. The applications I run don't support this behaviour out of the box, so why should I have to code up something for each app?
>There's little functional difference between syntax and options in this case,
There is an important difference. The manpage on timers spends most words explaining what exactly each option does and how it can be useful while most of the crontab manpage explains how the syntax works, the options crontab provides are minimal.